IBM will begin offering two levels of support of the open source version starting sometime in September: basic 24-hour electronic support and 8 x 5 (business day) enhanced support.
Geronimo is one of several new open source alternatives to JBoss that have emerged over the past year in the application server market (the ObjectWeb consortium’s Jonas and Sun’s recently-announced GlassFish are the others).
IBM acquired Gluecode to serve a low-end market that considers WebSphere Express, the company’s existing entry level offering, too costly and complex.
However IBM’s announcement today is not about supporting the Gluecode product itself, as that was part of the original acquisition deal. Instead, this is about providing paid support for a pure open source stack that IBM neither owns nor controls the release schedule.
That could create some interesting challenges for IBM, as new builds in open source typically come much faster than with traditional commercial development. Just about the only precedent is the Apache HTTP server, a mature technology that has been part of the core WebSphere appserver product for years.
According to Scott Cosby, who heads the Gluecode corporate transition for IBM, the goal is to offer fairly real-time support for new builds. We might not support it in the next hour, but we will stay up with the latest builds, he promised.
Obviously, the goal of IBM offering to provide paid support is to help prospective Geronimo customers to get over the fear of the unsupported. Of course, you could get that by buying the commercial distribution of Geronimo.
But by adding support of the pure open source, IBM is making a statement that the technology stack, which you probably never heard of previously, will indeed be around for a while.
In related news, IBM is contributing the GUI-based Gluecode management console to Apache. Cosby likened that decision as a no brainer because the console would make Geronimo much more accessible.
With the ink drying on the support announcement, IBM has not yet disclosed exact release dates or pricing.
